About this site
Fifty notes on workforce forecasting and demand planning, written for the people who have to publish a number and then live with the decision somebody takes on it: resource planners, operations managers, workforce management teams, and whoever is asked in November how many people will be needed in March.
What it covers
What a forecast is for, which is always a decision with a lead time. How the object changes with distance, and why a week-ahead and a year-ahead forecast share almost nothing. The historical series every forecast is a claim about, and what is usually wrong with it. What actually moves demand, separated from what everybody blames. What each method assumes. How to measure error, including the direction of it. And what to do about the fact that somebody always adjusts the number before it is published.
What it leaves out
Rostering and scheduling. Once the forecast exists, turning it into shifts is a separate discipline with its own literature, and this collection stops at the point where the number is handed over.
It also leaves out capacity accounting — what an organisation has and what it has already committed — which is a different problem and is not improved by better forecasting.
And it leaves out what any particular rule requires: what notice a change of hours needs, what a staffing decision obliges anybody to, and what may be agreed differ by jurisdiction, by sector and by agreement, and are a question for somebody qualified where you are.
About the figures
Every number on this site is an illustration of what one organisation recorded for itself, and is labelled as such. None of them is a benchmark, a survey result or a statement of what any method requires.